Newswise — Stony Brook University computer science professors ,Dr. I.V. Ramakrishnan and Dr. Amanda Stent, and psychology professor Susan Brennan have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to study ways to make the Internet more accessible and user-friendly to people who are visually impaired or blind.
The Internet has become an essential tool for accessing information and performing everyday tasks such as banking, paying bills, shopping and communicating. However, the primary method of interaction over the Internet is through graphical browsers designed for visual navigation, which seriously limit access for people with impaired vision or blindness. In the U.S. alone, there are approximately10 million visually impaired and blind people.
"Existing assistive technology for non-visual Internet access typically forces blind or visually impaired users into an inefficient, sequential mode of information access," said Ramakrishnan. "To do better, we need to build computational models to represent the structure of web pages and online transactions, and to present them effectively using non-visual modalities. In addition, we need to better understand how users' mental models for online transactions are built and utilized; we then need to align the computational models with the users' mental models, so as to combine their strengths and significantly improve the efficiency of non-visual interactions."
The ultimate goal of Ramakrishnan's research is to empower blind and visually-impaired to lead completely independent lives with the aid of the Internet.
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